Wednesday

journalism / links / photo / Samford / Tumblr / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on There was no gold. I looked.
25
Sep 13

There was no gold. I looked.

The newspaper industry, they gave it away online for a decade or more, suddenly decided to charge for it online and now, I’m sure, are stupefied by this news:

Now that roughly a third of the nation’s newspapers are charging for access to their web and mobile content, the early evidence suggests that digital audiences aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about paying for news as publishers are about charging for it.

Although digital-only subscribers make up 37.6% of the total circulation of the Wall Street Journal and 34.4% of the total readership of the New York Times, the number of digital-only subscribers at Gannett, the largest publisher of general-interest newspapers in the land, is 2.2% of its average aggregate weekday circulation of 3 million subscribers.

Notwithstanding the relative productivity of their paywalls, the paid penetration at the Journal and the Times pales in comparison to the success that Netflix, Spotify, Major League Baseball and other ventures have had in selling entertainment-oriented digital content.

Some of those entertainment and news comparisons stretch the bonds of credulity, but they do say one thing: People will pay for a service online, just not the news.

It is simple economic theory, really. You can easily charge for a scarcity. There is a great volume of news, analysis and information around us. Some of it isn’t worth the download to be sure, but a great deal of it is readily available.

You might say it isn’t the news they need. You might be right, to an extent. You might also be called an elitist gatekeeper for saying that.

At the end of the day your news seeker is a resourceful individual. He or she has plenty of options to find what they want, or at the very least, enough to make them feel they’ve gotten what they need.

So the search for a compelling and profitable news model will continue. Even as I remind you that news has always been a (civically minded) loss leader.

Speaking of losses … now you can find out how much the Affordable Care Act is going to cost you. Finally.

Also, my insurance is increasing, so that’s nice.

Our state doesn’t get the opportunity to brag about education frequently enough, but here’s one where we are on the top of the list: Alabama high school students lead nation in increase in passing advanced placement tests.

Reviewed the newspaper this afternoon. They are designing a sharp looking product — and they were only in the newsroom until 2:30 this morning, so that is an improvement. Today we talked about story selection and word use.

Pretty soon I’ll run out of things to find wrong and will simply be down to the very subjective things.

Here is the rainbow I saw on the way home this evening:

rainbow

One of the meteorologists said there was a storm in some little town, a wide spot on the road really, to my east. I was on the interstate about 20 miles away. I glanced up and saw the clouds. I looked back to the road. I glanced up again and saw the rainbow.

Here’s a post on the multimedia blog.

Here’s something from Tumblr.

There’s more on Twitter.

journalism / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Two videos worth your time
18
Sep 13

Two videos worth your time

I’ve been saying for some time now that I want an aerial drone. You can chip in for a nice one for me and I’ll think of you every time I fly it and edit amazing (to me) videos.

If that’s too expensive, I’d understand. You can always train an eagle and strap a camera on its back. I’d take that:

I never get tired of these crowd-funding stories. This one is about a woman in Texas who is fighting stage four lymphoma. Her family asked for help getting a good place to tailgate before a Texas A&M game. Someone picked up that idea and ran with it. And then Aggies from all over the world, people who didn’t know each other, did something amazing. The video is a bit long, but it is worth it:

They put together more than $13,000, food, a shopping spree, sideline passes and more. They were just looking for a tailgating spot.

Never underestimate the genuine decency and affection people can have for strangers. And gig ‘it, Shannon.

Three things from the multimedia blog that I forgot to link to here yesterday:

Where your audience is growing

Squeegee superheroes

Covering mass shootings, traumas

Last night the student-journalists at The Samford Crimson wrapped things up at about 3 a.m., a two hour improvement from last week.

At their critique meeting this evening I bragged on them — they’re doing a really good job at such an early point in their newspaper — and told them we were already down to picking on a lot of little things. Soon we’ll be on to the tough love, and challenging each other to go from good to great.

You can see the online version here.

collarbone / journalism / links / Samford / Storify / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on A lot about today’s news
11
Sep 13

A lot about today’s news

Not the way they’d anticipated this playing, I’d bet. On 9/11 the newspapers of the Alabama Media Group ran their cloned front pages to celebrate the 100th birthday of Paul Bryant. He died in 1983. Ignored was the 12th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. The reaction on Twitter was awkward. I’ve collected them on Storify. (Blogging continues below.)

That isn’t cherry picking. I searched Bryant’s name and the names of the papers and AMG. I didn’t add one which was linkbait. I chose not to include one which was tangential at best. I avoided anything that was purely directed at the University of Alabama. (They had their own unfortunate public response after today asking people to honor the former coach by changing their Facebook photos, but that’s not relevant here.)

Furthermore, of the 13 dailies from the state I surveyed today (via newseum.org) two localized 9/11. Two offered skybox teases to 9/11 content elsewhere in the paper. Four ran some elements of a wire story about New York’s current mayor Michael Bloomberg. There was not as much Syria on the collected front pages as you might imagine, either.

Meanwhile, talk radio host Matt Murphy had his way with the newspaper. You can hear that segment here.

As for the Crimson the paper looks impressive considering this is the new staff’s first paper. I’ve challenged them to start strong and become great quickly, and they’re answering. Here are the first two pages. They have plenty they can concentrate on, but I do believe this is the best first issue paper I’ve seen in my six years at Samford. And we’ve seen some fine starts, too.

They worked on it until almost daylight.

You can see the rest of the stories at samfordcrimson.com.

The department’s Twitter account liked it:

The day marched by quickly. Lunch at my desk. People talking about the paper. Phone calls, emails and so on.

There were meetings. Meetings where one ended so another could begin. Talking with students, an advertising meeting, the paper’s critique meeting.

Left work to go on step two of the tuxedo rental odyssey. Stopped by a place last week to try to match a rental with someone (whom I’ve yet to meet) who owns a tux with a fair description and one photograph. The guy last week said it couldn’t be done. The guy this week, in step two, told me to go back to step one.

Good thing everyone will be busy staring at the bride and not me. Maybe they won’t notice if I go with the blue ruffles.

Got home and everything seized up on me again. Went immediately to the foam roller and abandoned that for the flat floor. That helped a bit, but I ended up in such a state I didn’t know how to get up.

But, more therapy tomorrow, so there’s that.

collarbone / photo / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Wanna see my bones?
4
Sep 13

Wanna see my bones?

Well, do ya?

Returned to see the new orthopedic surgeon today after our first meeting two weeks ago and the bone scan last week. The first good news remains that I did not grow wings or a third eye or gain a mutant power from the radiology. Not that I expected I would. The radiologist said that rarely happens. One assumes that we’re in the clear there, especially since it didn’t come up when the doctor today discussed the results of the scan.

So he’s looking at the collarbone area, the purpose of the scan being to rule out any bone problems. He said there are none. He probably said some other things, but I stopped listening. It is one thing to see your own bones. It is another to see your own skull.

bones

At the end of the day we can say the bone is fine. And your own skull is creepy.

Now we’ve ruled out nerves, rotator cuff and the bones. We’re down to the hardware and muscular problems. The hardware is an issue, but as I told the doctor, if your magic wand only works once I’d say let’s use it on the shoulder.

So he’s sending me to more physical therapy, a different set of therapists. The phrase I get to use now is scapular stabilization dysfunction. The doctor keeps saying that an accident such as mine involved a great deal of physical trauma.

Because, 14 months later, you want more therapy and a three-word title attached to your problem. (I don’t mean to complain, but … ) We agreed that my shoulder and its recovery have not reached their optimal condition. The good news is that, being muscular, there is improvement to be had. So we’re pleased with that.

Conveniently the new therapy center is close by the doctor’s office, so we set that up. I get to start next week.

How unusual has this summer been?

Alabama’s 2013 summer went into the books as one of the coolest summers in the 131-year record, with an average high temperature that was almost 2° cooler than seasonal norms.

How cool was it?

For the three months of “meteorological” summer no station in Alabama hit 100 degrees. If that holds up (we won’t have all of the temperature data for a few days and the folks at the Southeastern Regional Climate Center are keeping an eye out), this summer will be only the fourth time that has happened since 1883. The others were 1965, 1994 and 2001.

Three times in the last 20 years. Most unusual.

And now, all you need to know about foreign policy as it relates to Syria in four videos:

He didn’t …

Except when he did …

The guy that works for him says so …

And this, the most egregious of it all:

Someone approached our top diplomat and said “We’ll pay for it.” And he said, “OK.”

As opposed to kicking them out of the room or hanging up on them or pointing out that this would make us mercenaries.

Shameful.

Oh, and it sounds less and less like that piece of adventurism would simply be cruise missiles from the sea:

Securing Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles and the facilities that produced them would likely require the U.S. to send more than 75,000 ground troops into the Middle Eastern country, MailOnline learned Wednesday.

That estimate comes from a secret memorandum the U.S. Department of Defense prepared for President Obama in early 2012.

U.S. Central Command arrived at the figure of 75,000 ground troops as part of a written series of military options for dealing with Bashar al-Assad more than 18 months ago, long before the U.S. confirmed internally that the Syrian dictator was using the weapons against rebel factions within his borders.

Tim Siedell has the final word:

Auburn / football / journalism / links / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Links to things
28
Aug 13

Links to things

We’ve been watching the last quarter of the 2010 football season on DVD as a way of preparing for the college football season, which opens tomorrow night. Last night we saw the SEC championship game, which I think I only saw the one time, live. It was an emotional thing, that day. Still fairly stirring.

Tonight we watch the national championship against Oregon. It has its drama, but it isn’t terribly exciting in some respects. Knowing the outcome is, of course, anticlimactic in a small way. The win was the thing, but that SEC championship game was the most complete effort of that amazing season. And knowing what it meant, and knowing it came at Darth Spurrier’s expense made it all the better.

All of which is to say nothing new, except this. It was this video that really made me look forward to this season.

Ronnie Brown is a bad man. (Hard to believe it has been nine years since some of that footage was shot.) The New York Restoration Choir sounds great. Bring on the football.

Would you like a bit of history? NPR has a great piece on what was one of the rhetorical inspirations for Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. You can hear it! I knew the provenance of the imagery, but I’d never heard the original speech before. It is fascinating in every way, though that’s not really the voice I imagined Pastor Archibald Carey Jr. having. Give it a listen.

Here’s a longer read on the future of NASA:

NASA is looking for a rock. It’s got to be out there somewhere — a small asteroid circling the sun and passing close to Earth. It can’t be too big or too small. Something 20 to 30 feet in diameter would work. It can’t be spinning too rapidly, or tumbling knees over elbows. It can’t be a speed demon. And it shouldn’t be a heap of loose material, like a rubble pile.

The rock, if it can be found, would be the target for what NASA calls the Asteroid Redirect Mission. Almost out of nowhere it has emerged as a central element of NASA’s human spaceflight strategy for the next decade. Rarely has the agency proposed an idea so controversial among lawmakers, so fraught with technical and scientific uncertainties, and so hard to explain to ordinary people.

It just doesn’t sound like the same agency in some ways, but there is some boldness in the plan, if you read on.

Here’s a conversation that delves into the origins of online scholastic journalism. Before WordPress, before a lot of tools, you had to hand-code everything. Now, not so much:

Yet there persists an odd notion that a newspaper staff is more deserving of awards for its online journalism and that its online work is more authentic if they built their website or even their WordPress theme themselves. There’s a confusion in this logic –– a failure to distinguish the tool from the content; we only tend to see this confusion when working with newer tools. No one would question the value of using a word processing tool and writing on a computer over using a typewriter. No one would question the value of using desktop publishing software and new printing technology over hand-set type. No one would question the value of a photo taken with a digital camera over one taken with a film camera and printed in a darkroom. That’s because we’ve recognized that Microsoft Word, GoogleDocs, InDesign, PhotoShop, and digital SLR cameras are tools that allow our students to do better work.

We now need to make that same recognition with our understanding of WordPress and its templates. Buying a good WordPress template is the same as buying Adobe CS7 or buying a new digital SLR camera. CS7 won’t create your design for you, a camera won’t take its own pictures, and a WordPress template won’t write and publish stories, photos, and videos in a timely and relevant manner. New tools create new efficiencies and new opportunities –– they allow us to report better, write better, design better, and connect with our audiences better, and our national contest and critique standards need to evolve to reflect the new realities of the tools used for web publishing.

I bolded my favorite part. This debate isn’t restricted to online tools designed for efficiency versus the most laborious method possible. Value the journalism over the tool, or the medium for that matter.

One more PBS thing, a series of serious and concerted thoughts on a digital curriculum from Dr. Cindy Royal:

what I am proposing is curriculum in which digital is the foundation, and the basic skills of writing, reporting and editing are injected into digitally focused courses, as opposed to inserting a digital lesson or two into traditional classes.

Most programs have courses at their core that introduce basic skills, things like Media Writing, Media Law and Introduction to Mass Communication. Other programs also require courses in Media History or Mass Media and Society. I propose we flip and reconfigure these courses with a digital emphasis.

That’s worth a read if you’re interested in journalism or pedagogy.

Did I mention I renamed my work blog? I renamed my work blog. Made it a little more inclusive, avoids any university branding concerns and just sounds more vaguely fun. So check out the creatively titled Multimedia Links. Several new posts this week as we’ve gotten back to the classroom:

Must have apps

The FOIA Machine

Sleuthing public records

Crowdsourcing history

Things that, perhaps, should be reconsidered

Still not sold on mobile

Evernote tips

I try to get as many students as possible to read that site, so there will be more to write this year.

More, more, more!

We want more.

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